Hey guys!! This is Dr. David at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy.

I wanted to talk to you guys today about that tight neck and shoulder region.

I’m not really talking about the neck or the shoulder but the area in between. A lot of people complain of tightness in that area.

My patients who have desk jobs especially complain of this and it’s usually because in the sitting position, the weight of the arm pulls that muscle in that area of the body.

When patients come into see me for this, we frequently hear the stories of what they’re doing to try to alleviate the pain that they have there.

And here’s what they do:

• They’ll massage the area
• They’ll stretch out the area by moving their head like this and putting a good stretch on it
• Or many people will take pain medication
• Or use hot packs or cold packs especially toward the end of the day when it gets worse.

All that stuff might actually help the pain reduce a little bit but it’s not fixing the original problem and getting you out of pain for good.

Now here’s the key measurement that I take with all my patients to make sure we find the problem and fix it for good so you’re not getting that pain.

We look at collar bone angles. We take a protractor and measure the angle of the collar bone.

Our skeleton here has very depressed (sunken down) collar bones. You should be at 20-30 degrees. It’s pretty flat here.

Looking at the muscles in the body it’s that trapezius muscle that helps hold to the collar bone up at the right angle.

Here’s the back view of that trapezius muscle and you can see how it attaches to the base of the skull and the neck out to the ridgeline of the shoulder blade.

So you can see now how if that upper trap muscle is weak it’s going to drop that collarbone angle down and put that muscle on a huge stretch.

If you imagine me stretching my finger here all the way up like that I can take this for a little while but imagine me doing it all day long as you might in a work day of 8 hours or more.

My finger would not like it. It would aggravate it quite a bit.

That’s exactly what’s going on right up here because the weight of your arm is pulling that down into a big stretch.

Additionally, when that muscle is being pulled down…because of its attachment to the neck and head…it might force your head to get into a “forward head position”.

That causes:

• all the neck joints to get stiff
• could set off tension headaches
• pinched nerves down into the arm and shoulder

Here’s a shrugging exercise that you can do that gets you to activate the upper trapezius.

Get the shoulders all the way up to get those strong.

It’s incredible…we’ve had amazing results with this exercise!

BUT – You’ve got you make sure that you shrug up 100%. It’s easy to not do 100% and just do 70% or 80%.

***If you’ve been taking pain medication, or you think you might need surgery because you have a pinched nerve in your neck…START DOING THIS NOW!!***

You might get relief today.

It will give you relief in the short term…but as you get stronger and stronger…it will give you long term relief too.

What’s SUPER COOL is that we can re-measure your collar bone angle and we should see it go up over time. Your achy neck and shoulder symptoms will get better when this happens.

That’s the tip for today everyone. It’s very powerful.

Put it to practice and you’re sure to benefit quite a bit!!